Published in Issue 65.1: Winter 2026
You can purchase our Winter issue here.
Repetitions
I
Omar takes off his shirt, Syria
written in English tattooed across his chest,
from now on he will think
only to kill who killed his family.
Syria? Bye-bye, Syria, he says, bye-bye.
II
Or how Blake saw America,
a conflagration of raging fires,
the poor placing pop-top cans
of beans on burning coals this,
the coldest night of the year.
III
Permanent war, permanent crisis,
whatever you wish to call it, Mona texts,
so much corruption, so much hatred
in my heart it scares me. Then one day
one of the century’s heaviest days
of aerial bombardment, a manhunt,
more than eighty bombs without warning
flattening six apartment buildings,
those who are incinerated are
collateral damage the Prime Minister
finishes his speech, we will turn
Lebanon into Gaza, United States-
manufactured joint direct attack
munitions, guidance kits attached to
two thousand-pound bombs
converted into GPS-guided bombs
forty-two years after Sabra and Chatila,
Minister of Defense aka The Butcher
of Beirut’s pogrom executed
by Lebanese Phalangist minions,
thirty-five hundred (no one
really knows exactly how many)
penned-in women, men, and children,
a day and a half (no one really knows
exactly how long) of orgiastic killing,
victims’ corpses covered with lime
packed into buckets of frontend
loaders, disposed of in mass graves.
LAWRENCE JOSEPH was born and raised in Detroit, the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His new book of poems, Precisely Now, will be published by FSG in 2026. He is a retired Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law and lives in New York City.
